T-shirt globalization

Pietra Rivoli's book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade was the subject of a recent (10/19/05) IMF book forum. The transcript is available. Rivoli gives an overview of the book, as well as a fascinating look at globalization today. She uses the honored dialectical method of starting with one thing, and by exploring all of its interconnections, coming to an understanding of the whole (like Marx did by starting Capital off with an investigation of "commodity" to get to the workings of capitalism). In Rivoli's case, she uses a the life of a t-shirt to explore the global economy. (From one of the "list" links on Amazon, I see there is actually a genre of "commodity biography".) The transcript is worth the read.

jd

[P.S. - NPR did a series based around Rivoli's book in April '05, called The World in a T-Shirt. The NPR page has a map and links to book excerpts.]

Sensuous Materialism

David Abram's remarkable book The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage, 1996) accomplishes an amazing task. Without going beyond the perceptible world, the world of nature, the material world, he is able to infuse it with wondrous-ness, what one might call spirituality except that it is so firmly rooted in the world. As Abram has said elsewhere, "spirit is matter."

Building his argument on the work of French philosopher / phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Abram provides a concise interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's work. The starting point is the material, sentient body, in the world, and its "silent conversation with things".

-- perception is inherently interactive, an act of participation, a reciprocal interplay between perceiver and perceived.

-- perceived things are encountered as animate, living (unfinished) presences. Our spontaneous pre-conceptual experience yields no evidence for a dualistic division between animate and inanimate phenomena, only for a relative distinction.

-- the complex interchange called "language" is rooted in the non-verbal exchange always already going on between our flesh and the flesh of the world.

Whereas traditional science privileges the sensible field, abstracted from the sensing experience (what one might call mechanistic materialism); and "New Age spiritualism regularly privileges pure sentience, or subjectivity, in abstraction from sensible matter" (and going so far as to claim the world is illusion created by mind or spirit),

both of these views perpetuate the distinction between human "subjects" and natural "objects", and hence neither threatens the common conception of sensible nature as a purely passive dimension suitable for human manipulation and use. While both of these views are unstable, each bolsters the other; by bouncing from one to the other -- from scientific determinism to spiritual idealism an back again -- contemporary discourse easily avoids the possibility that both the perceiving being and the perceived being are of the same stuff, that the perceiver and the perceived are interdependent and in some sense even reversible aspects of a common animate element, or Flesh, that is at once both sensible and sensitive. (pp 66-67)

Interdependence, reciprocity, interaction, participation, interpenetration -- this is the vocabulary of dialectics. This is no coincidence, as Merleau-Ponty was a Marxist in the post-WWII French intellectual tradition (for a fascinating history of that milieu, see Mark Poster's Existential Marxism in Postwar France). And coupled with this sensuous materialism -- a universe sensing and sensed, alive in some way -- this treatment excites, enlivens and elevates dialectical materialism.

Those two words, "dialectical" and "materialism", put together, are weighted down with so much historical baggage. On the one hand, suggesting some connection between Abram's work and dialectical materialism does a disservice to him (and Merleau-Ponty too) inasmuch as it may stop the prospective reader from going any further. On the other hand though, if "dialectical materialism" invokes history, exploitation and class struggle, then that perhaps is good.

Abram's book is a philosophy of ecology. He acknowledges the personal task of "remembering", "renewing reciprocity", not "going back" but "going full circle", "uniting our capacity for cool reason with this more sensorial, mimetic ways of knowing, letting the vision of a common world root itself in our direct, participatory engagement with the local and the particular." (270) The sensuous world is always local. He acknowledges also the political task of "engaging in political realities". He doesn't come out, though, and say that the destruction of the environment cannot be stopped short of stopping capitalism -- how can he? It's not that kind of book, and he may not be that kind of person. But that is the insight that "dialectical materialism" provides, and precisely the act that "dialectical materialism" invokes.

"Materialism" may be one of those words that has exhausted its usefulness, or ability to convey new meaning. Engels wrote how the conception of materialism had to keep pace with science. But the idea of "the Universe is one, and is as a whole absolutely self-determined, but no part of it is absolutely self-determined", "every part of the Universe is in mutually determining relations with the rest of the Universe," "the Universe is a material unity, and that this is becoming," "this material unity cannot be determined by thought alone, it is established by thought in unity with practice, by thought emerging from practice and going out into practice," as Christopher Caudwell wrote ["practice" I would say embraces all interaction with the world, doing things, of which laboring and the production process is of course a very important part].

This description of materialism, a dialectical materialism is not the mechanical materialism typically assumed as "materialism"; nor is it atomism or metaphysical materialism -- both outlooks were more or less destroyed by physics in the late 19th and 20th centuries. But it is a materialism that does not allow for a being outside of the Universe, not a Creator or an "Intelligent Designer". The Universe is It, feeling and being felt, not being, but becoming.

jd

The introduction to The Spell of the Sensuous

Mystery Alaska

We watched the H'wood movie "Mystery, Alaska" last night, a cute and familiar story of small town rural America vs what? dehumanized, de-passionized, urbanized, corporatized America I suppose. Almost a Red State / Blue State contradiction without the false moralism (they drink and screw a lot in Mystery). The hockey players of Mystery (Nature = mystery) skate on the river and play on pond ice surrounded by majestic mountains and forests. The New York Rangers play indoors arena hockey with boards (fences) and overlaid lines (cartesia) on the ice. A kind of Lake Woebegone, the women are wholesome and fresh, the men strong and virile and honest (except for the one who left to go to the big city, and returns as an outsider.) The town is beset by a Walmart-like company ("PriceWorld") trying to invade the town, a store clerk's "accidental" response is to shoot the PriceWorld representative (who clearly articulates the contempt of corporate America for, well, Americans).

I was reminded of the polarization of town and country that Marx describes in many places, one of the destructive consequences of capitalism. And that that polarization itself a reflection of, or an aspect of, and/or a contributor to, the alienation of humans and Nature that also accompanies capitalism. Which is likewise an echo of the alienation of humans-as-workers from the production process and the fruits of their labors. (see e.g., John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology.)

Some additional thoughts on this:

One -- alienation as a kind of connection, or anti-connection.

Two -- the appeal of "country" music to city folk as a yearning for healing the human/Nature rift. Of wanting to be closer to something that sounds like Nature. I know squat about country music in general, but I understand that it comes out of rural laboring, whether white agricultural labor ("country" music or "cowboy"/"western" music) or black agricultural labor ("blues"). The sensuous body; the alienation, exploitation and poverty; music as expression...

Three -- the danger of the idolization of rural Americans as People of the Earth, the volk, real Americans vs the urban invaders, aliens, violators, spoilers -- the roots of ecofascism. Instead of recognizing that the destruction of rural life is intimately connected with, is the flip-side of, the destruction of urban life...

jd

Science vs "Intelligent design" scorecard

Some links related to the battle of darkness and ignorance vs. science:

Good news from Dover, PA
Intelligent Design Falls Hard: Dover, PA, reams school board over Creationist teaching (Village Voice)
A Decisive Election in a Town Roiled Over Intelligent Design (New York Times)
Pat Robertson: Intelligent design rejection was a vote against God: "On today's broadcast of 'The 700 Club,' Robertson told Dover residents, 'If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God.' The founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network explained, 'You just voted God out of your city.'"

Bad news from Kansas (don't trust future graduates from Kansas schools posing as scientists)
Kansas School Board Approves Controversial Science Standards (New York Times)

(and also Roanoke, Virginia: 'Intelligent design' supporter wins school board seat)

jd

More trees falling in the forest

A few more notes on yesterday's post regarding speculative capital and timber:

One of Marx's first political writings dealt with timber. His article "Debates on the Law on the Thefts of Wood", which he wrote as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, defended the right of peasants to scavenge wood from what had once been common land. Wood was the main source of fuel for heating homes and cooking food. For a discussion of this topic, as well as the development of Marx's overall thinking on nature and the environment, see John Bellamy Foster's fascinating book Marx's Ecology: Materialism and nature, 2000, Monthly Review Press. "What was at issue," Bellamy writes, "was the dissolution of the final rights of the peasants in relation to what had been the common land -- rights that had existed from time immemorial but which were being eliminated by the growth of industrialization and the system of private property." (66)

So the trajectory looks something like this: Common land; enclosure or privatization of forest land by the large (family) landowners; the industrialization of timber production and ownership by timber corporations; the ownership by hedge funds and pension funds. Memo to self: for a future project, map the alienation of human from nature onto property relations and see what turns up.

For more on "speculative capital" as I use the term, see a paper I did for the 2002 Global Studies Association meeting. Briefly, the idea is that capital can play different roles or take different forms. "Productive capital" is capital applied to actual production -- tied up in raw materials or machinery or advanced as wages. Inasmuch as this capital is used in industrial processes (and we could include industrialized agriculture here), it is "industrial capital." "Finance capital", following from Lenin (which is fair I think, as Marxist economics is the context in which I am looking at these forms) is the merger of "bank capital" with "industrial capital" under the control of the banks. This capital was still directed towards production. "Speculative capital" is a subset of finance capital, or develops from it, and is capital involved in the trading of financial instruments; derivatives in the broadest sense of the term -- instruments derived from underlying titles or goods or commodities or assets. Typically speculative capital is used in the management of risk.

In this sense, Harvard's large endowment is not speculative capital per se. In its ownership of large tracts of forest the university functions more like a rentier, holding the asset and selling timber rights back to the timber corporations from which it bought the land. It gives an institutional face to the land ownership. When money managers securitize the woods though, e.g. by setting up timber funds that investors can subscribe to, or real estate investment trusts (REITs) that then sell shares on the open market, then this can properly be seen as the functioning of speculative capital. The underlying asset (the forest) has been converted into shares that can then be traded among investors. Inasmuch as the forest generates income, these shares are titles to future income streams -- what Marx called "fictitious capital".

Another WSJ article on 11/4/05, "REITs Spread to Timber Industry As Paper Market Struggles, Firms Adopt New Structure In Bid to Boost Share Prices" by Chelsea Deweese describes how these REITs work:

With growth in the paper market sluggish and the timber market battered by cutthroat competition, timber companies have been looking for ways to boost their share prices and stand out with investors. For the companies, a big advantage to becoming a REIT is that they no longer have to pay corporate income tax on earnings from land holdings.

...

Integrated forest-product companies once tried to do it all: own land, harvest trees and produce paper and other wood products. Today, under pressure from shareholders who want them to maximize the value of their timberland, companies are being forced to restructure.

...

REITs typically pay out hefty dividends, because they are required to pass 90% of their earnings to shareholders. And because earnings from timberland REITs are considered capital gains, their dividends are taxed at a lower rate -- a maximum of 15%, compared with up to 35% for other REITs, whose earnings don't all qualify as capital gains.

...

Timber REITs have performed so well that some non-REIT timber companies have faced investor pressure to do more to keep up, analysts say. Mr. Chercover says some companies are lobbying Congress for changes in the law so their timber operations would be "taxed on a level playing field with the REITs." [the connections in the economy compel other players to keep up or fail - jd]

...

But the growth of timber REITs has some on Wall Street worried. These REITs make money buying and selling timberland real estate to property developers. If the housing market cools and land sales decline, timber REITs may see their earnings suffer. In addition, a real-estate downturn could chill demand for wood for building houses, which also could hurt timber REITs.

"We are in a very strong market for wood, but that's not going to last forever," says Richard Schneider, an analyst at UBS Warburg.

Ben Inker, director of asset allocation at investment firm Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo in Boston, says the REIT structure isn't ideal for all timber companies. Once a company converts, he says, it may feel pressure from shareholders to produce steady revenue, which could force it to cut down trees even if demand for wood dries up.

The article also notes that in the case of Plum Creek raised enough money through the REIT to begin trading in timber real estate, in addition to exploiting the natural resources.

Speculative capital represents an abstraction from the act of production. There is the production itself, then the loans, bonds, etc. that finance of production, and then the various levels of abstraction of speculative capital: the shares that represent titles to production or income streams, the mutual funds or exchange-traded funds that represent no particular company, but an industry or the economy as a whole, the instruments that represent the price movement of those shares, and finally, modern-day derivatives that link together distant and distinct markets and commodities together.

This degree of distancing (can it also be called alienation?) of capital mirrors the trajectory of property.

Finally, speculation is rooted in the management of risk, of which the first and main source is Nature -- storms at sea, weather-related crop failure, floods or drought or hurricanes. From the trade in tulip futures in Holland in the 1600s to the trade in weather derivatives at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange today, speculative capital has had an intimate relationship to Nature. Memo to self -- another project.

Abstraction, insulation, securitization, protect -- the language of alienation.

jd

Timber!

The second article in the Wall Street Journal's series "Awash in cash: Cheap money, growing risks" provides a fascinating look at an odd dimension of speculative capital.

"U.S. Timberland Gets Pricey As Big Money Seeks Shelter" by E. S. Browning (11/4/05) looks at pension funds, endowments and real estate investment trusts buying up timberland in the never-ending quest for higher returns. On the other side of the transaction, lumber and paper companies, under pressure from shareholders to improve bottom lines, are converting forest land to cash. "The result is an enormous land transfer now under way." Mirroring the general process of industrial capital yielding to speculative capital, the industrial owners of the land are transferring title to pools of speculative capital. Per the article, some $30 billion of timberland is owned by financial investors (six times what it was in 1994). Just as speculative capital has no direct connection to actual production processes, the new owners of the timberland are far removed from trees and lumber.

The numbers are amazing: in one sale, a Boston money-management firm bought more than 5% of the state of Maine. Harvard University has 10 percent of its massive endowment portfolio of $26 billion assigned to timber investments; it is the second largest owner of forest land in New Zealand.

Why timber?

With bond yields puny and stocks flat year-to-date, timber offers a shot at stable returns in the high single digits, mostly from long-term growth in the value of the land and its trees. Low interest rates make it cheap for an investor to borrow cash to magnify a bet on timber.

As a hard asset, timber also has appeal as a haven from possible worsening inflation that might undermine financial assets. And it has diversification value: Its market performance historically is largely uncorrelated with those of stocks and bonds -- when they zig, timberland may do nothing or may even zag.

Timber investment itself is not without risk. As more money flows into timber, prices are climbing and yields are falling. Also, as with any commodity, timber has its vulnerabilities -- demand might slacken, or the cost of borrowing to purchase land might rise, hurting returns.

Since speculative capital in general, and in this particular case, remote timber ownership, is abstracted from the transformation of use values, the connection between speculative capital and land, community, worker, environment is tenuous at best. In the case of identifiable owners like Harvard or Yale, the point of resistance is identifiable and confrontable. In the case of hedge funds and real estate trusts, the owners dissolve into the faceless sea of capital. Fund managers can authorize clear-cutting forests or building sub-developments to maximize short term returns. This is not to suggest that industrial capital has any more sympathy for the communities it exploits; only that the terms and terrain of confrontation and resistance change with the forms of capital. Capital becomes, as Marx wrote, a general, a social power.


jd

Dynamic atomism

"In the sciences ... a continual circulation takes place -- not because the objects themselves change, but because new observations produce a need in each scientist to assert himself, to handle knowledge and the sciences in his own way.

"But since human thought also follows a certain circular pattern, a reversal of method will always bring us back to the same point. These atomistic and dynamic concepts will forever alternate, but only in emphasis, for neither will wholly replace the other. This holds true even for the individual scientist. Before he realizes it the most determined dynamist will fall into atomistic terminology, while the atomist will be unable to avoid becoming dynamistic at times." (Goethe, in "My Relationship to Science, and to Geology in Particular", Goethe: Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. by Douglas Miller. Suhrkamp Publishers. 1988. pp 138-9.)

"Atomism" refers to a crude or metaphysical materialism, where the world is seen to be composed of discrete stable particles. If "dynamism" can be construed in the sense of motion, change, development, then the "dynamic atomism" described by Goethe can be seen as a precursor of, or early articulation of, dialectical materialism?

jd

Flood of capital

On page 1 of today's (11/3/05) Wall Street Journal, an article by Greg Ip and Mark Whitehouse titled "Huge Flood of Capital to Invest Spurs World-Wide Risk Taking". I think Greg Ip is one of the WSJ's most insightful writers in capturing the content of the high tech / speculative capitalism.

I think that deflation is the tendency in high tech/digital capitalism, inasmuch as price corresponds to value on a global scale, and less value is bound up in commodities produced under near-laborless conditions. But just like Marx's famous "Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall", it is a tendency that invokes counter-tendencies that mute or even counteract the tendency.

In the case of deflation, one counter-tendency is the rise in labor-intensive production in low-wage production sites (China, Bangladesh, El Salvador etc) on the one-hand, and the expansion of labor-intensive services and various forms of unproductive labor to ensure the circulation of commodities. (For more on this paradox see The End of Value.) While prices may tend to fall in, say, manufactured goods, prices rise for things like health care and education.

The "Huge Flood of Capital" article describes another counter-tendency -- capital that can't be invested profitably in the production of stuff (no need for more capacity) goes chasing for returns in other markets. Per the article, world pension funds, insurance companies and mutual funds have $46 trillion at their disposal, up almost a third since 2000. U.S. companies alone have $1.3 trillion in liquid assets. This capital, when compounded through leverage (investing with borrowed money), pushes up the price in investment markets, in turn reducing overall return. "This means that investors are demanding less compensation than usual for taking on the risk inherent in owning the assets." This in turn can lead to a positive feedback cycle (or a vicious cycle) of more money chasing fewer returns. Or as one person quoted in the article says, "It is a global game of chicken."

The obvious danger is a crash in asset prices if capital is withdrawn for whatever reason -- e.g., investors become more averse to risk, or companies expand investment. Given the high degree of interconnection in modern speculative capital, the danger of systemic crisis is present.

jd

Oil, Wal-Mart, environment

Two bits:

Regarding the "end of cheap oil": A global production line and global market means a dispersed economy; and so requires a dense web of transportation connections to sustain that dispersion. Since most transportation technology uses oil in one form or another for power, the degree to which oil prices can affect such an economy is dramatic. Whether the current high price of oil is historic (in the sense of being part of a long-term crisis, where increasing demand, shrinking reserves and slowing discovery is a long-term trend, and likely to just get worse) or merely episodic (hurricanes and/or political storms are causing temporary disruptions in supply and, with speculators, causing bursts in price, technology is allowing previously hard-to-get oil to be cheaply retrieved affecting the total reserves available, more efficient technology will hold down increasing demand) -- in either case expensive oil has the potential of a serious re-alignment of the connections in a global economy.

From a recent discussion (aired 10/18) on Christopher Lydon's Open Source radio program, called "The End of the Oil Age", I take it this disruption is discussed in James Howard Kunstler's book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. In the show, Kunstler is definitely in the camp that the high price of oil is a historic event, with terrible consequences for the current economic structure. Here's a link to a condensed version of the book which appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. For example:

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

Wal-Mart also figured in a Living on Earth radio program, "Wal-Mart to Reduce Its Environmental Footprint" (aired week of 10/28/05). The story raises in general (albeit implicitly) the contradiction between capitalism and the environment. Capitalism tends to see the environment as an economic externality; the cost of trashing the environment is paid for not by the polluter, but by you and me and everybody else -- via ruined health, taxpayer-paid cleanup, and the loss of unspoiled nature. However, there are ways that going green cuts internal costs; with the environmental benefits being a useful by-product and good for public relations.

E.g., in the radio program, Andy Ruben, the VP of Corporate Strategy and Sustainability at Wal-Mart says that by reducing the package size of just one toy brand that Wal-Mart carries will save it $2.4 million in transportation costs (presumably more will fit in each cargo container coming from China, and on each warehouse on wheels), meaning 3,800 trees that will not be harvested, and 1,000 barrels of oil that won't be burned.

jd

Materialism quote

"But just as idealism underwent a series of stages of development, so also did materialism. With each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science, it has to change its form." Frederich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

Tools and consciousness

An article by Gautam Naik, "Arrowhead Case: Knapping Hits a Spot For Flint-Stone Fans" appeared in the 10/6/05 Wall Street Journal, on the modern-day hobby of "knapping" -- making Stone Age tools the Stone Age way. Naik quotes knapping superstar Jim Spears: "Every stone is different and every stone is a challenge... It helps me get into the minds of ancient people."

The means by which we interact with the world -- tools, processes, production, rituals -- structures and bounds our thinking. To understand a people, try out their tools. Okay it's more complicated than that, and it would be extremely difficult to forget everything we know and the way we know it -- the recreation of the past is always problematic -- but immersion into the tool culture of a people provides a peek into a different consciousness.

jd

Goethean Science

The journal Janus Head's summer 2005 issue is devoted to "Goethean science". Craig Holdrege of The Nature Institute is one of the guest editors.

jd

Policed state

First some links that came across a Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility mailing list today:

Secret tracking codes in Xerox printers cracked: Xerox and other printer manufacturers print tracking codes on each document the user prints, ostensibly to thwart counterfeiting

Adobe, others slip anticounterfeiting code into apps: Applications designed to not open certain images, again "to foil counterfeiting"

FBI to get veto power over PC software?: Declan McCullagh reports that according to a recently released FCC document, "to preserve the openness that characterizes today's Internet, 'consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.'" To which Declan cautions the reader: "Read the last seven words again."

Wiretap rules for VoIP, broadband coming in 2007: Rules to ease wiretapping.

The rest of this post is excerpted from a discussion that I contributed to on "the police state". The conference took place in 1995. The complete text is no longer available:

The "police state" is not just a state form, but a description of social relations. It includes not just the obvious relationship of the state to the citizen, but also the realms of neighborhood life, social services, production, the reproduction of labor power, and culture. The "police state" describes not just the "state" as the organ of enforcing class rule, but also a "state of existence", which can be roughly described as the absence of legal protection of the property-less classes; or the rule of the propertied class unfettered by a social contract or constitutional law.

...

The contemporary police state is the form which capitalist society assumes on a foundation of electronics technology. We frequently describe this as the form that capitalists must use to preserve their property from the property-less, and to protect their rule from the new class creating itself in the wake of the new technologies. But we can also look at this in other ways.

In order to maintain high tech production, and the circulation of commodities, and hence the realization of value and of profits, the capitalists must turn to more and more sophisticated techniques. In general, all of these techniques involve the spontaneous construction of a "surveillance society", where people are monitored as workers (if they still work), as consumers (to the extent they still consume) or, otherwise, as non-producing non-consumers. This surveillance society is both needed by capital, and is also only feasible because the technology is cheap enough to allow the collection and storage of new types of data. The once-unique purview of the state -- the collection and storage of personal data -- is now possible by private firms willing to pay the minimum wage to have someone key-in data from public records, or pay for tapes from state agencies, or match information from credit bureaus, census reports and on-line telephone directories . To the degree that information commons is enclosed and privatized, communication is subject to censorship -- not by the state, but by the "owner" of the system via which communication takes place (as has happened with the joint IBM-Sears project called Prodigy) .

Contemporary production relies on fewer workers who are expected to devote their attention, creativity and loyalty to the "knowledge-intensive" workplace. The proper "attitude" is a key job requirement. At the point of production, workers are screened before employment via private firms that handle background checks, or in the near future, perhaps, via a national "work eligibility" database, and during employment by keystroke monitoring, drug tests, "smart" badges, videotaping, and computer logs. So workers must submit to the surveillance regime or be blocked from participating in the high-tech capitalist economy.

After the workday, consumer profiles are created via purchases at the grocery store, credit card purchases, loans and mortgages, drivers license information, calls to the "National Psychic Network" -- that is, via any of the expanding list of activities that leave a data trail. Companies, because of increased competition, shrinking markets, the need to be more efficient in marketing, (or as entrepreneurs, creating new commodities in the form of various kinds of mailing lists) are compelled to collect and utilize this data to survive in the contemporary business climate. This "data shadow" can be accessed in turn by employers or the state. For the non-producing non-consumers, their data shadow is different -- it exists in the welfare and police data systems. People are categorized and classified, and some effectively filtered out of the high tech economy, by what Oscar Gandy, Jr. calls "the panoptic sort".[Oscar Gandy Jr., The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information, 1993; See also, "Consumer Profiles and Panopticism," proceedings of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, Chicago, 1994; Computer Underground Digest, available in the comp.soc.cud newsgroup on the Internet; "Computers and the Poor", CPSR Newsletter, 1993; and "Workplace and Consumer Privacy Under Siege," Macworld, Special Report, 1993.]

Capitalism in the age of electronics means both the end of privacy, and the extension of privatization, as further reaches of human activity are commodified in the search for profit. With the end of privacy, comes the end of legal protections like the right not to self-incriminate (the data shadow does not know how to keep its mouth shut, and laws illegalize such a broad range of human activity). With privatization comes the conflict of civil and human rights with property rights. Compelled by the demands of the high tech economy, capitalism can take no other form that the "police state."

jd

Creative Commons

Here is a clear description of the Creative Commons license.

Although not confronting the logic of "intellectual property", the license does provide a convenient way for creators to flow around existing law. Perhaps in that way the Creative Commons concept serves to undermine IP.


jd

Predictive markets

Found this on Marty Kearns' fine Network-centric Advocacy blog, a reference to Yahoo's technology prediction market, Yahoo Tech Buzz. Prediction markets are based on the notion that crowd thinking in many cases is more accurate than "expert" thinking. James Surowiecki popularized this idea in his book The Wisdom of Crowds (see earlier posts on this blog). John Brunner also had something like this in his classic and remarkably prescient 1970s sci-fi novel Shockwave Rider.

The Yahoo market uses NewsFutures engine. See their "A Simple Example" page for how these markets work.

"Market" is accurate in the sense that people trade "shares" that have some either real money value (as in the case of the Iowa Electronic Markets political futures market) or play money value as is the case with the Yahoo Tech Buzz market. The notion is that the "market" only works if the participants have something at stake (presumably something scarce and desirable, like real money). In the case of play money markets, this might be reputation or desire to win or "to be right" or "not be wrong". I wonder if the structure of "market" is necessary for such a mechanism to work -- could there be a predictive commons? Surowiecki argues that for crowds to be "smart", they need to be diverse and the members independent, otherwise you get herd behavior. The market by definition assumes the separation between participants on the basis of conflicting (self) interest. But the positing of a "self" is a philosophical assertion, and "self-interest" a political position. Perhaps some sort of collective-interest expressed through the individual, the struggle of internal contradiction as opposed to "self-interest". Hmmm.

Research indicates that these markets can be more accurate predictors than a room of experts. Marty's blog calls for one for environmental issues. An open source version anyone.

jd

Richard Lewontin NYRB article

Richard Lewontin, co-author of The Dialectical Biologist, has a review of a couple recent books on evolution in the Oct 11, 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books. In "The Wars Over Evolution", he covers a lot of ground.

He unmasks creationism dressed up as "intelligent design" ("if the living world is too complex to have arisen without an intelligent designer, then where did the intelligent designer come from?").

He gets to the spring of creationism -- the social and psychological dislocation resulting from the technology revolution and globlization are driving a pummelled and bewildered people into a soothing story of love and redemption:

What is at issue here is whether the experience of one's family, social, and working life, with its share of angst, pain, fatigue, and failure, can provide meaning in the absence of a belief in an ordained higher purpose. The continued appeal of a story of a divine creation of human life is that it provides, for those for whom the ordinary experience of living does not, a seductive relief from what Eric Fromm called the Anxiety of Meaninglessness...

He also defends Darwinism from those who would make it into more than it is. He concisely summarizes the fundamental tenets:

Darwinism is a population-based theory consisting of three claims. First, there is variation in some characteristics among individuals in a population. Second, that variation is heritable. That is, offspring tend to resemble their biological parents more than they do unrelated individuals. ... Third, there are different survival and reproduction rates among individuals carrying different variants of a characteristic, depending on the environment inhabited by the carriers. That is the principle of natural selection. The consequence of differential reproduction of individuals with different inherited variants is that the population becomes richer over generations in some forms and poorer in others. The population evolves.

He challenges the notion of directionality or progress in evolution ("evolutionary biology is not, in fact, committed to progress"):

[T]he modern empirical science of evolutionary biology and the mathematical apparatus that has been developed to make a coherent account of changes that result from the underlying biological processes of inheritance and natural selection do not make use of a priori ideas of progress... So why does evolution not result in a general increase of the fitness of life to the external world? Wouldn't that be progress? The reason that there is no general progress is that the environments in which particular species live are themselves changing and, relative to the organisms, are usually getting worse. So most of natural selection is concerned with keeping up.

Lewontin swiftly dismisses sociobiology, memes, evolutionary psychology and other attempts to overlay Darwinism onto social processes:

"We would be much more likely to reach a correct theory of cultural change if the attempt to understand the history of human institutions on the cheap, by making analogies with organic evolution, were abandoned. What we need instead is the much more difficult effort to construct a theory of historical causation that flows directly from the phenomena to be explained."

Good stuff.

jd

Random quotes

"The flood control equation is the sum of many parts, and to view only one or two of those parts without consideration of their relation to the whole is to invariably reach a badly flawed conclusion." Yazoo (Mississippi) Delta Levee Board

"There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there." William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

"The ability to recognize significant resemblances and analogies ... I shall call knowledge... The elements in poetic diction which must conduce to it are, as we shall see, metaphor and simile... A little reflection shows that all meaning -- even of the most primitive kind -- is dependent on the possession of some measure of this power. Where it was wholly absent, the entire phenomenal cosmos must be extinguished. All sounds would fuse into one meaningless roar, all sights into one chaotic panorama, amid which no individual objects -- not even colour itself -- would be distinguishable." Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

"We have learned from Saussure that a human language is structured not so much as a collection of terms, each of which possesses a determinate meaning, but as a complexly ramified web, wherein the knots, or terms, hold their specific place or meaning only by virtue of their direct or indirect relations to all other terms within the language. If such were indeed the case, then even just a few terms or phrases borrowed directly from the vocal speech sounds of other animals would server to subtly influence all the ratios of the language, rooting the language, as it were, in a particular ecology, a particular terrain." David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

jd

P2P and Human Evolution

Michel Bauwens has written an interesting piece "Peer to Peer and Human Evolution": "peer to peer as the intersubjective dynamic at work in distributed networks, and how it is creating a third mode of production, peer production, a third mode of governance, peer governance, and universal common property regimes."

There is quite a bit there -- p2p economics, p2p politics, even p2p spirituality. Hopefully after I have had a chance to look through it I can offer some substantive comments.

For a weekly newsletter that includes comments on Michel's manuscript, as well as lots of interesting links and bits, see http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p

jd

More pattern recognition

Maybe there's a pattern here. I'm reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. He references "apophenia" (see the 8/30/05 post below), a term which, I like to think, I came across on my own, by as much accident as web crawling and googling can be. Not that it matters -- inspired by, learning from, borrowing, building on the borrowed, cross pollination. A quote from Marshall McLuhan in "Media and Cultural Change" (in Essential McLuhan, edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, 1995, BasicBooks): "If the business of the teacher is to save the student's time..." How development is done.

For example, Gibson (publish date 2/03): "Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition, [Parkaboy, one of the characters] says." Ray Kurzweil, quoted in Steven Gibson's Emergence (publish date 8/02): "Humans are far more skilled at recognizing patterns than in thinking through logical combinations... Indeed, pattern recognition comprises the bulk of our neural circuitry."

No surprise -- themes? memes? circulating. Cultural echoes. Resonance. The "quality of the time" expressing itself.

On a separate track (but really, how separate can it be?) I am also reading David Abram's remarkable The Spell of the Sensuous (more on this in a future post I hope). In one section he discusses the impact of the phonetic alphabet on consciousness -- references to McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy among others. So me digging out the book referenced above, and then coming across this (bear with me through the extended quote):

[Harold Innis] changed his procedure from working with a 'point of view' to that of generating insights by the method of 'interface,' as it is named in chemistry. 'Interface' refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of 'symbolism' (Greek 'symballein' -- to throw together) with its paratactic procedure of juxtaposing without connectives. This interplay of aspects [as is likelier to happen in conversation or dialogue -- jd] can generate insights or discovery. By contrast, a point of view is merely a way of looking at something. But an insight is the sudden awareness of a complex process of interaction.

Following an interesting observation that the process of transferring data, information, knowledge to computer tape -- he was writing this in the early 1960s -- required people to look at the knowledge structurally -- to understand the form of the knowledge: "This has led to the discovery of the basic difference between classified knowledge and pattern recognition."

And then McLuhan quotes from Kenneth Sayre's 1963 Modelling the Mind:

Classification is a process, something that takes up one's time, which one might do reluctantly, unwillingly or enthusiastically, which can be done with more or less success, done very well or very poorly. Recognition, in sharp contrast, is not time-consuming. A person may spend a long while looking before recognition occurs, but when it occurs, it is "instantaneous." When recognition occurs, it is not an act which would be said to be performed either reluctantly or enthusiastically, compliantly or under protest. Moreover, the notion of recognition being unsuccessful, or having been done very poorly, seems to make no sense at all.

Wheee!

jd

Après Le Déluge

Political power is exercised through social networks. Yes individuals make history, and yes under specific conditions, but never alone. History, inasmuch as it is made by humans, is always made by humans organized -- networked -- with others.

The contest over the re-building of New Orleans is underway. As always the question is, in whose interests? Not whose individual interests, but whose class interests? And the contending forces will be represented or expressed by networks of individuals, sharing common values and goals. In most cases the contest will play out within a broader arena of class interests -- the contestants share a common interest in the supremacy of private property, the extraction of maximum profit, the maintenance of basic existing class relations -- but the how being up for grabs.

How a real class contest might be fought is a much more interesting question. The hurricane and flood are providing a real opportunity. The shock at the stark display of absolute disregard of the country's ruling class for the poor; and the profound disillusionment with the government -- its tax-breaks for the rich, its oil war, its abandonment of responsibility to provide for the general welfare -- creates an opportunity for a new politic. But without the networks in place, networks with a coherence around goals and vision, the opportunity will recede as suredly as the flood waters.

It is not unfair, or exaggerated, to call the ruling class a "ruling class". They are networked (perhaps better to say there are many networks, at different layers, regions, sectors, etc, inter-networked), and generally are conscious of their goals and vision. A telling article in the September 8, 2005 Wall Street Journal (see the Common Dreams repost), titled "Old-Line Families Escape Worst of Flood And Plot the Future", describes a representative of one such network.

Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.

The owners and regional managers of the New Orleans economy live in the same neighborhoods, vacation at the same resorts, and interact in the same social circles. They run the city. And this network is moving to implement its vision of New Orleans after the flood. "[Anton O'Dwyer] says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin [the Mayor of New Orleans] to begin mapping out a future for the city."

One of the sub-texts in the talk of the future is if it is possible to re-make the city without its poor. "The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss [a wealthy local businessman] says, with better services and fewer poor people. 'Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,' he says. 'I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out.'"

There are other forces competing to steer the future of the region. An article in today's (9/15/05) WSJ reports "with as much as $200 billion beginning to gush out of Washington for the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone, the fight already has begun over who will control the spending and make critical decisions about the future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast." The future funds may be controlled by a federal body a la the Tennessee Valley Authority, usurping the state and local governments. This of course does not mean that the local networks are necessarily out of the picture -- their means of exerting control over the situation may more easily be accomplished via a Republican Party-controlled federal agency than a Democratic Party-controlled state or local authority. Which of course doesn't mean that the Democrats would re-build the city with democracy in mind, only that they are answering to a different network of capital.

It appears, as has been the case historically, that the poor are a political pawn in the maneuvering, with no clear organization or network articulating their class interests. Class cuts across race, albeit not evenly, and there is no reason to expect that the black owning class will represent the class interests of the poor, whether black or white, except in as much as they can rely on the votes of the un-propertied to maintain their political position. For example, from today's article:

On Monday night, nearly 30 black business leaders from New Orleans and Baton Rouge met at a church in the capital city to discuss ways to make sure that all New Orleans citizens are included in conversations about how to rebuild the city.
"What makes this city so great is the gumbo mix of people," says Alden J. McDonald Jr., chief executive of Liberty Bank & Trust Co., one of the nation's largest black-controlled banks, and chairman of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce. "Everyone has to be at the table."

The rhetoric of inclusion implies that all classes need to be represented, but this is unlikely, no? Simply because the poor, by-and-large, while loosely "networked" through churches, gangs (who stepped up to provide some semblance order at the Convention Center), neighborhood social circles, etc., are not organized for political power, and so the political leadership can so easily be usurped. This is not because of any inherent failings among the property-less, but because the ruling class deliberately works to undermine independent expressions of class power that emerge in spite of the poverty of resources, education, etc.

This raises an interesting dimension of networks. What about the space between the nodes and links, the negative space or anti-matter of networks? In this case, these would be the dis-connected. The people-without-value (in the Marxist sense of the term that is -- no use-value as worker, and no opportunity to realize the exchange value of their labor power). Of course un-connected in one sense, but connected in other dimensions -- economically as consumer without real choice or politically as voter without real choice. Or culturally as spring of innovation and desires. Or historically, as agent of mayhem, rebellion or revolution.

jd